[Rummyfan]

Mark Steyn's speech to the New Criterion/Social Affairs Unit symposium in New York.

[Choose Ye This Day]

Long, good, and posted last night.

[Choose Ye This Day]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1550345/posts

[expatpat]

Much as I love Mark Steyn, I think he's wrong to write Europe off too quickly. There is a hard, nasty core at the heart of the European people. (The Germans in WWII, the French in Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Brits in Kenya and Malaya, etc.)

It has largely been quiescent since 1945, but it is still there, and will be resurgent when things really start to hurt. And when their homelands are at stake, they will win.

[Straight Vermonter]

...just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral

Oops. I suspect he is referring to the Hagia Sophia which mean "holy wisdom" not St Sophia.

[Question_Assumptions]

My guess is that when the Europeans and Japanese become impoverished by the collapse of their social service system and imploding demographics and feel more threatened by other encroaching cultures than Republicans, things will change and the birth rate will start to rise (I often wonder whether intelligence, education, and affluence are evolutionary dead-ends ). Whether it happens soon enough to turn things around remains to be seen. And the wild card is whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons in radical Muslim nations like Iran leads to a full nuclear exchange that changes everything. Given how Hell-bent Iran and other Muslim nations and terrorists seem to be to get their hands on nuclear weapons, a nuclear exchange (possibly involving the US or the Russia, if the Chechyans get their hands on one, but more likely involving Israel, who has 100-200 nuclear weapons if the rumors are to be believed) may happen quite a bit before the demographic problems Steyn predicts actually happen. I'm not convinced, as he is, that the Muslim radicals are patient or all that smart. 9/11 suggests that they aren't either.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths—or, at any rate, virtues—and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Well said.

[Popman]

This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

Ouch, that's going to leave a mark

[governsleastgovernsbest]

Scary, depressing read, but hopefully one that will rally people to thought and action.

[Ditto]

Bookmark bump.

[Freee-dame]

bump

[mylife]

The progressive agenda —lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society: Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native-American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.

I believe that Steyn is correct in seeing that Al Queda views the liberal agenda as our weakness and wish to exploit "the enemy within".

Its our job to seed western ideals of self reliance to the east as well as the west in order to counter them

[Lurker]

For later.

L

[steel_resolve]

Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant?

Why indeed. Every idiot liberal should have to read this.

[Billthedrill]

...they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

Ah, the old "historical inevitability" thing - one reason this is not an issue of the Left is that there are an awful lot of disappointed true believers over there who are still desperately holding out for their own form of historical inevitability, wherein capitalism founders from its own internal contradictions and a new socialist utopia eventuates. To the Islamists it's the same metaphor - only the utopia takes a different form. Both are fated to be disappointed in the end, I suspect, but that doesn't mean the road from here to there isn't going to be as bloody as the road from 1917 to 1989 turned out to be.

I am less alarmed than Steyn with respect to the ability of Western society to function on a less-populated and older-median-age model. Given a measure that doesn't figure into these calculations, i.e. the longer span of productivity of latterday humanity and the help that technology promises with respect to yet longer health, it appears to me that we might very well ride out this period of low birthrate, in the absence of demographic changes produced by migration. That's always the issue - history is, if it may be distilled to one single measure, the story of migratory peoples coming on new land, very little of which was unpopulated before they happened along. In that sense I think Steyn correct when he blows the warning horn on the influx of the unassimilatable. It is this, and not just birthrates, that is the immediate peril for Europe, IMHO.

[darkocean]

Steyn is missing one large point. The problem is not abortion per-se. You still have to have abortion in cases or rape, incest, and other hardship cases and attempts to outlaw those abortions just get democrats elected to public offices

The abortions you really DON'T want happening are those taking place because the girl is 17 or 20 years old and doesn't have a reasonable way to think she can raise a child and manage her life at the same time. To solve that problem societies have to tackle the real problem, i.e. they need to make it possible for their own seventeen to twenty-five year olds to marry and have children at the ages when we're biologically programmed to do so (16 - 25) and not at 35 - 50 when they're "financially capable" of it.

A rational society should prefer to pay the price for that to paying the price for putting their country under sharia law which, as Steyn notes, is basically the alternative.

[Publius6961]

The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims.

LOL!

The maggots have no sense of humor so they probably aren't laughing. I can't help laughing and can't stop, every time these losers fire their press release salvos that 3-year-olds would have a hard time believing...

[MediaAnalyst]

Howdy. Thanks for the nice words about America in our dialog - and sorry about being being so presumptuous.

Anyway, you may want to read Mr. Steyn's New Year's piece here. He basically lays out your future, pretty much the way that I was stating it. I just hope that enough writing on the subject, while it is still legal at least, will convince the MSM over there that the war clouds are forming, and something better be done real fast to avoid a bloodbath.

[Dave Olson]

...to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East...

I'm not sure about that. When Europe has and overall unemployment rate that's about double what it is here, that says it has an undersupply of jobs available.

So why would it need to import more workers to fill jobs that don't exist?

[colorado tanker]

Good speech.

I recommend From Dawn to Decadence by Barzun. It explains the Western Civilization that came into being about 500 years ago and examines how our civilization is now in a state of advanced decline. What will come next?

[Popman]

Probably the most important article I have read in some time

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